Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 29, 2019 19:14:19 GMT
It is said that change is a constant, except from vending machines. Temple communities, as I mentioned only a couple of weeks ago, are made up of dwellers and seekers, or usually people who are a bit of both. For seekers, change is not usually much of a concern, because the very act of seeking indicates a clear desire to move from one place to another, either intellectually, spiritually, morally, or even physically. For dwellers, though, change can be deeply traumatic. The dweller, who wants to be left enjoying where they are, finds change unbearable because it unsettles their grounding. I want to be clear that this is not a critique of dwellers – indeed, were it not for dwellers, we would rarely be able to define who we are, just where we have been. A sense of directionality is great but a sense of place is essential, too.
It might be a bold claim - but I’m going to make it anyway – that Western society is now primarily aimed at dwelling and not seeking. The journey has become far less important than the final destination. High-speed travel, high-speed internet, information at the tips of our fingers, have all been amazing for the advancement of humanity, but they have also redefined what it means to be human, and not necessarily in a positive way in terms of the effect on the human psyche. I remember listening to someone on the radio bemoaning GPS over maps because people have lost a vital skill of map-reading but, more importantly, because they no longer notice the landscape around them. The person said that we used to give directions according to landmarks – turn left at the church, turn right just after the library – which caused people to have to pay attention to the world around them. Now, though, we only wait for the computerized voice to tell us when to turn. We have no need to pay attention to the journey any more. We have rather lost the art of seeking.
Never is this more true than in communal life, especially places of worship. Those who claim to be seekers are usually just dwellers who want to repackage what already exists, so that they can claim that they have been seeking, when really they never had to even uproot their tent pegs. Much of the difficulty of being seekers in community life is because of financial limits, because people find it very difficult to imagine adding a new building, for example, when the community can hardly afford the upkeep of the present building!
It’s actually ironic that Jewish communities particularly struggle dwelling and seeking, because from the very beginning we have been unable to dwell. Adam and Eve try to dwell in the Garden, but find themselves expelled. Avram dwells in Haran but is called to God to seek and no longer dwell. His descendants end up dwelling in the land of Egypt, but that didn’t do them well at all, and eventually they had to leave to seek a new life. More than half of the Torah is a description of Israelite wandering in the wilderness, not dwelling. Jewish life throughout the Middle Ages was tenuous, with communities living in the expectation of pogroms or expulsions. We dwelled, but only for a while, before being seekers once more. With that in mind, my mother used to say that I’m British, not English, because I’m not attached to any country because Jews are never attached to a single country. Throughout almost all of our history, we have been a people on the move, a people living in liminality. The Enlightenment changed that, allowed Jews to settle, and therefore gave permission for a community that had always been seekers to become dwellers. We stopped, we took a breath, we paused. Then the Holocaust happened, which reminded us once again that we were strangers in a strange land, wherever we were. And then the immediate creation of the State of Israel afterwards countered that, proving that there will always be a place for Jews to dwell, but only, of course, for people who wanted to live there. Outside of Israel, the Jewish community did everything it could to settle, to dwell, to be comfortable and safe. But the dramatic changes between being seekers and dwellers, and the dramatic changes in the outside world in terms of technology, the decline of hierarchy and the corresponding rise in personal autonomy have left the Jewish community almost paralyzed in terms of how to respond to uncertain times. Do we respond with more tradition, to become a place of dwelling in a world of ever-increasing seeking? Or do we respond with more creativity, more seeking, in order to appeal to a generation that is constantly seeking? “Both!” communities often cry eagerly, but in truth, they are afraid of profound change because in an ever-changing world they want to hold onto their communal identity which they mistakenly frame around previous communal praxis, instead of community narrative. Communities say they are who they are by virtue of what they currently do, not by virtue of the narrative of their journey. That is why finishing the TBS History is so important to me, so that we can define ourselves by our journey, not just by current custom.
The challenge for communities is that sometimes we don’t get to choose when change comes upon us – sometimes the journey from dwellers to seekers is thrust upon us, as often happened in the Jewish community’s past. Then dwellers want to return to dwelling as quickly as possible, renew the status quo, just in a slightly different form. But it is important not to do that – it is important to follow the three-stage process in every transition. Those three stages are separation, the liminal period, and then reorientation. Separation is the most painful because it essentially strips the person, the group or the community of their previously held identity. As soon as separation occurs, people – especially communities – tend to rush towards the third stage, that of reorientation. But the second stage, the liminal period, is absolutely essential for reorientation to be successful. It is, in fact, that liminal period which Jews should most often celebrate, although they often do not. Jewish people have, as I said, been liminal ever since our inception.
Fiddler on the Roof, which had a transformative effect on the contemporary Jewish psyche, suggests that what has helped the Jewish community maintain its identity through times of seeking is tradition. That is the constant which gives the transient Jewish people their grounding. The problem with that is immediately obvious – that unchanging tradition becomes such a grounding-place that it becomes stultified and ends up not speaking to seekers because it seems so backwards. In fact, local custom easily becomes the dwelling place of communities to the point that they often call themselves seekers, but are really seekers in name only. Sometimes, all community members can see in the journey ahead is a repackaged version of the journey they have already experienced.
So, how do we create a community for dwellers and seekers in such an uncertain time? How do we genuinely seek and not merely repackage the past? The answer is in properly living in the second stage – the liminal period, and not rushing beyond it. Liminality can be profoundly discomforting but it is, in fact, the stage where the most creativity can happen because it is the stage in which a person or a community is least bound by previous restrictions or by future commitments. Liminality is essential for communities to be able to grow. Without it, people and communities rush into decisions that restrict them, and are usually little more than the past in a slightly varied form. Liminality is the place where a person or community should experiment. That’s why, for example, next month we will have two new experiments in our services. The first is the reintroduction of the Tot Shabbat, but with the difference that it will be connected to a communal pot-luck so that older community members spend time with younger families, making connections where they previously didn’t exist. The second experiment is what is likely to be called the TBS Tisch, which is based on a Chasidic custom where people spend Shabbat at the table, learning, singing and, for those who wish, drinking.
Our community is living in uncertain times, with the wider Jewish community changing profoundly around us. And that’s great. That’s wonderful. That’s something we should celebrate as an opportunity to help us all come up with creative new ways to reimagine our community for the coming years. We have had three staffing changes in the last six months, and while it’s been very difficult for us to let go of that past and that grounding, we are now in a very exciting place, a place of imagination and of experimentation. I don’t want to rush out of it - I want us to explore. I want our members to come up with new ideas for us to try. I want us to see liminality not as something to avoid, but to embrace, not as something to end as quickly as possible, but as something to use creatively. So, let’s use this time of liminality to be creative, to reimagine our community, not to repackage the old and pretend it’s the new. Let’s look around and be honest about what needs to stay the same and what could change. Let’s publicly vocalize the vast array of possibilities that lie ahead of us, and let’s enjoy this time of potentiality. Let us, in short, dwell in our seeking, for that is truly the essence of Jewish life, and let us say, Amen.
It might be a bold claim - but I’m going to make it anyway – that Western society is now primarily aimed at dwelling and not seeking. The journey has become far less important than the final destination. High-speed travel, high-speed internet, information at the tips of our fingers, have all been amazing for the advancement of humanity, but they have also redefined what it means to be human, and not necessarily in a positive way in terms of the effect on the human psyche. I remember listening to someone on the radio bemoaning GPS over maps because people have lost a vital skill of map-reading but, more importantly, because they no longer notice the landscape around them. The person said that we used to give directions according to landmarks – turn left at the church, turn right just after the library – which caused people to have to pay attention to the world around them. Now, though, we only wait for the computerized voice to tell us when to turn. We have no need to pay attention to the journey any more. We have rather lost the art of seeking.
Never is this more true than in communal life, especially places of worship. Those who claim to be seekers are usually just dwellers who want to repackage what already exists, so that they can claim that they have been seeking, when really they never had to even uproot their tent pegs. Much of the difficulty of being seekers in community life is because of financial limits, because people find it very difficult to imagine adding a new building, for example, when the community can hardly afford the upkeep of the present building!
It’s actually ironic that Jewish communities particularly struggle dwelling and seeking, because from the very beginning we have been unable to dwell. Adam and Eve try to dwell in the Garden, but find themselves expelled. Avram dwells in Haran but is called to God to seek and no longer dwell. His descendants end up dwelling in the land of Egypt, but that didn’t do them well at all, and eventually they had to leave to seek a new life. More than half of the Torah is a description of Israelite wandering in the wilderness, not dwelling. Jewish life throughout the Middle Ages was tenuous, with communities living in the expectation of pogroms or expulsions. We dwelled, but only for a while, before being seekers once more. With that in mind, my mother used to say that I’m British, not English, because I’m not attached to any country because Jews are never attached to a single country. Throughout almost all of our history, we have been a people on the move, a people living in liminality. The Enlightenment changed that, allowed Jews to settle, and therefore gave permission for a community that had always been seekers to become dwellers. We stopped, we took a breath, we paused. Then the Holocaust happened, which reminded us once again that we were strangers in a strange land, wherever we were. And then the immediate creation of the State of Israel afterwards countered that, proving that there will always be a place for Jews to dwell, but only, of course, for people who wanted to live there. Outside of Israel, the Jewish community did everything it could to settle, to dwell, to be comfortable and safe. But the dramatic changes between being seekers and dwellers, and the dramatic changes in the outside world in terms of technology, the decline of hierarchy and the corresponding rise in personal autonomy have left the Jewish community almost paralyzed in terms of how to respond to uncertain times. Do we respond with more tradition, to become a place of dwelling in a world of ever-increasing seeking? Or do we respond with more creativity, more seeking, in order to appeal to a generation that is constantly seeking? “Both!” communities often cry eagerly, but in truth, they are afraid of profound change because in an ever-changing world they want to hold onto their communal identity which they mistakenly frame around previous communal praxis, instead of community narrative. Communities say they are who they are by virtue of what they currently do, not by virtue of the narrative of their journey. That is why finishing the TBS History is so important to me, so that we can define ourselves by our journey, not just by current custom.
The challenge for communities is that sometimes we don’t get to choose when change comes upon us – sometimes the journey from dwellers to seekers is thrust upon us, as often happened in the Jewish community’s past. Then dwellers want to return to dwelling as quickly as possible, renew the status quo, just in a slightly different form. But it is important not to do that – it is important to follow the three-stage process in every transition. Those three stages are separation, the liminal period, and then reorientation. Separation is the most painful because it essentially strips the person, the group or the community of their previously held identity. As soon as separation occurs, people – especially communities – tend to rush towards the third stage, that of reorientation. But the second stage, the liminal period, is absolutely essential for reorientation to be successful. It is, in fact, that liminal period which Jews should most often celebrate, although they often do not. Jewish people have, as I said, been liminal ever since our inception.
Fiddler on the Roof, which had a transformative effect on the contemporary Jewish psyche, suggests that what has helped the Jewish community maintain its identity through times of seeking is tradition. That is the constant which gives the transient Jewish people their grounding. The problem with that is immediately obvious – that unchanging tradition becomes such a grounding-place that it becomes stultified and ends up not speaking to seekers because it seems so backwards. In fact, local custom easily becomes the dwelling place of communities to the point that they often call themselves seekers, but are really seekers in name only. Sometimes, all community members can see in the journey ahead is a repackaged version of the journey they have already experienced.
So, how do we create a community for dwellers and seekers in such an uncertain time? How do we genuinely seek and not merely repackage the past? The answer is in properly living in the second stage – the liminal period, and not rushing beyond it. Liminality can be profoundly discomforting but it is, in fact, the stage where the most creativity can happen because it is the stage in which a person or a community is least bound by previous restrictions or by future commitments. Liminality is essential for communities to be able to grow. Without it, people and communities rush into decisions that restrict them, and are usually little more than the past in a slightly varied form. Liminality is the place where a person or community should experiment. That’s why, for example, next month we will have two new experiments in our services. The first is the reintroduction of the Tot Shabbat, but with the difference that it will be connected to a communal pot-luck so that older community members spend time with younger families, making connections where they previously didn’t exist. The second experiment is what is likely to be called the TBS Tisch, which is based on a Chasidic custom where people spend Shabbat at the table, learning, singing and, for those who wish, drinking.
Our community is living in uncertain times, with the wider Jewish community changing profoundly around us. And that’s great. That’s wonderful. That’s something we should celebrate as an opportunity to help us all come up with creative new ways to reimagine our community for the coming years. We have had three staffing changes in the last six months, and while it’s been very difficult for us to let go of that past and that grounding, we are now in a very exciting place, a place of imagination and of experimentation. I don’t want to rush out of it - I want us to explore. I want our members to come up with new ideas for us to try. I want us to see liminality not as something to avoid, but to embrace, not as something to end as quickly as possible, but as something to use creatively. So, let’s use this time of liminality to be creative, to reimagine our community, not to repackage the old and pretend it’s the new. Let’s look around and be honest about what needs to stay the same and what could change. Let’s publicly vocalize the vast array of possibilities that lie ahead of us, and let’s enjoy this time of potentiality. Let us, in short, dwell in our seeking, for that is truly the essence of Jewish life, and let us say, Amen.